


Scatter

by lemonsharks



Series: Every Terrible, Necessary Choice [11]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, Goodbyes, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 20:46:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4639632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/pseuds/lemonsharks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Varric, and going home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scatter

**Author's Note:**

> For the fancy words meme: Strikhedonia - The pleasure of being able to say “to hell with it”.

They slipped away one at a time, and Trevelyan always found them before they went.

Dorian to Tevinter; Iron Bull and the Chargers with him, though Krem stayed on for a little while; Vivienne to Val Royeaux.

Solas, the first to bolt; Blackwall, the only one who got away without saying goodbye.

Sera had heard rumblings in Cumberland. Things that needed her attention. Friends she wanted to check in on herself.

The Great Hall filled up with people Varric didn’t know, and may as well have been empty.

  
  


The letters stopped arriving care of his publisher—his friends knew how to spot an Inquisition agent, and _they’re_ everywhere these days. Insidious. Divine Victoria left them with the kind of network that could topple empires. How lucky had Thedas got, that the Inquisitor is more interested in propping them up?

Varric knew Aveline’s hand as well as his own—she sent _reports_ , updates on he state of their city, enclosed with notes from Merrill. A packet of those arrived every couple of weeks; he’d crumpled the one that came after Adamant, that must have crossed paths with the letters he sent out. Hawke’s _dog_ knew something was wrong: he wouldn’t stop crying, or scratching at the door.

That was around the time Kirkwall stopped burning in earnest. Around the time when the last crews cleared away the last of the Chantry’s rubble from Hightown.

 _Everything has…shifted_ , Merrill had written, on a blank page torn out of the back of a book, thin as tissue. _You wouldn’t recognize it. I hardly can, some days—it seems like what I’m looking for is always three blocks to the left of where it should be. It’s quite irritating when you get down to it._

  
  


Some days he wrote three or four letters home. Some days he tucked all of them away between the pages of a book, until he could figure out a better way to say what he wanted.

They made do without a mage in the field: him and Cole and the Seeker and the Inquisitor. No one else had fit right, filled the gaping wound left behind by those who’d walked through fire to get here. The ones who’d looked the end of the world in the eye and said, “ _I don’t think so_.”

Some days he mixed his metaphors.

Once he tried teaching Cole how to cheat at cards.

Trevelyan found him at the Chargers’ old table in the Herald’s Rest. She put a half-empty bottle of rye and two glasses down between them, and regarded the mostly-blank scraps of paper he’d spread out.

No matter how many times he rearranged the events, they always came to the same ending.

“You, too?” she said, pouring for them both.

“Spider, don't—”

“Why, because I guessed right?”

“Because there’s something bigger coming; there’s _always_ something bigger coming, and you’ll need your people by your side for it.”

“We’ll manage,” she said, lowering her glass from her mouth. “Or we’ll gather you all back up and start again.”

Permission he didn’t need. Hadn’t asked for.

Varric moved the first scrap of paper to the end, and the last to the head of the line.


End file.
